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There was a lot in the press about mediation and we were quite interested to learn more about it.

In any

employment situation you can get conflict, it’s not always rational or logical and it is very emotional. What I liked about mediation was that it looks at how the parties feel. Having an opportunity to hear the impact they’re having on each other is quite revealing, but also quite healing.

I liked the impartiality. We make sure the mediators come from a different part of the business and are not related to, nor have a vested interest in that particular area of the business. They’re not in any way accountable for the outcome of the mediation. It’s completely confidential; it is not a case of “we’re going to put this on your file”. It’s absolutely up to the parties to resolve the issues as they see them.

We don’t expect the mediators to give any information back to us, other than to say that the parties turned up and they have or haven’t agreed a way forward. It’s a really good process and we’ve been really pleased with it.

How and when do you currently use mediation?

We have internal mediators and occasionally we use external mediators. Particularly for those on a more senior level, we need somebody completely independent.

Sometimes we get grievances raised against each other and the line manager says,”This is down to the two people and there is not enough information on either side”. That’s hugely difficult for them to deal with and getting people to hear what each one of them is saying is a much better way of resolving the dispute, rather than us trying to decide who is right and who is wrong.

Case Study

The UK Mediation Journal spoke to Sue Waldock, Group HR Director for the Rank Group, about what attracted her to mediation, how she went about implementing it, and her experience since. The Rank Group is a retail and online gambling organisation with around 12,000 employees across the UK.

How long did it take for you to implement mediation in Rank?

It was about 6 months initially. We looked at the proposal in 2009, then started training with Consensio in 2010 with the HR community and then for line managers in 2011. So it has been on-going for us, it gave us some really good life skills. It’s a different way of thinking about things.

How did you choose a training provider?

It is quite an investment of time and money to train as a mediator, so quality control was important. We wanted them to be recognised as having the ability to do what we were asking them to do. So having the accreditation through the Open College Network was important, and knowing that somebody external to the training provider was marking our work was helpful.

How did you go about implementing mediation, and how did you promote it to employees?

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managing conflict at w If this is your tool-k

If this is your tool-ki for managing conflic at work...

If this is your tool-k managing conflict at cmp resolutions

We haven’t done masses of promotion around the scheme, because if we opened it up to everybody we actually wouldn’t be able to cope. So we promoted it to the general managers via the HR community and to the Senior Leadership Team.

The mediation takes at least a day, getting mediators that are outside of the line or business, in different parts of the country and taking everybody out of the workplace, as we wouldn’t do it in a workplace setting, is quite expensive and time consuming. But it is a good investment when you compare it to the costs of tribunals or losing employees. So we try and follow our normal procedures but if we fear it’s not getting resolved then we would step in and offer mediation.

cmp resolutions Professional mediators

Mediators with over 20 years’ experience of workplace mediating

PROFESSIONAL MEDIATORS Professional mediators

Mediators with over 20 years’ experience of workplace mediating

Expert mediation training From a national certificate in mediation at work through to awareness raising and short courses

UK Mediation Journal | Issue 1 Sponsored by

Expert mediation training From a national certificate in mediation at work through to awareness raising and short courses

Mediators with over 20 years’ experience of workplace mediating

EXPERT MEDIATION TRAINING From a national certificate in mediation at work through to awareness raising and short courses